On the NSW North Coast lives one of Australia's rarest treasures, the coastal emu, a genetically distinct population down to fewer than fifty birds, almost all of them in the Clarence Valley. So when a forestry officer walking a state forest ahead of a logging operation found a nest holding nine eggs, everything changed. The harvest plans stopped, a wide buffer went up around the nest, and before long the officer's find became the loveliest kind of sighting: an emu dad wandering the forest with newly hatched chicks at his heels.
Read the full story: Endangered Coastal Emu chicks hatch, by Rodney Stevens, Clarence Valley Independent, as published on Australian Rural and Regional News.
The chicks keep coming. Recent community surveys counted twenty chicks among the Lower Clarence birds, and the whole valley has quietly organised itself around its emus: new road signage where the birds cross, drivers slowing down on Brooms Head Road, and locals, the council, rangers and even the local Lions Club running the annual counts together. Fifty birds is a perilously small number, and nobody pretends otherwise. But every chick that makes it to its first birthday tilts the odds, and a valley that stops its chainsaws for a nest of eggs is a valley that has decided its emus are staying.
Survey results from the NSW Saving our Species program.
